Incipit Vita Nova
by elphabathedelirious32
Summary: The hunter and the hunted, indistinguishable, sitting at the dinner table. Spencer Reid has a girlfriend, and she has a secret. Laura Petrocchi, M. D., is the daughter of Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling, and she isn't sure whose side she's on.
1. Chapter 1

"Do you- do you think they'll like me?" Spencer Reid was standing in the corner of his apartment while his girlfriend fussed with his shirt.

"Just—be polite," Laura Petrocchi said. "Don't blurt-"

"I don't-"

Laura tilted her head and cocked a dark eyebrow. She was infuriatingly pretty when she was annoyed, and was especially so now, dressed as she was for dinner with her parents: trim grey cashmere dress, dark hair swept back in a knot, silver and garnet earrings setting off her sherry-colored eyes. Reid grinned at her, in admittance.

"I'll try," he said.

They had met four months earlier, when Laura had joined the BAU. She had an M.D. and impeccable psychological credentials, and was perhaps the only person Spencer Reid have ever met who could match him for intelligence, for she was only just his age, as well. He asked her why she had gone to medical school at seventeen, and she'd said something about a family tradition. But everyone on the team had seemed, after a while, to expect the two of them to go out, and being, always, the two smartest people in the room had begun to have its effect, and they eventually began going out for coffee, and then dinner. At first it was just talking, and wonderful talking it was, the first time Spencer had simply sat and shared the contents of his mind with someone whose own held similar riches. And Laura's did; not only did she know about profiling and forensics, psychology and biology, but she spoke half a dozen languages and knew art and classical music and literature, of which she had memorized vast swaths. She didn't have an eidetic memory, as he did, but she had a vast capacity for retention all the same. Given that his was due to a mere fortunate turn of the genetic lottery and hers, he presumed, had to be the result of some combination of genes and hard work, he was deeply impressed by her near-perfect recall for the most trivial of details.

And she was _good _at profiling, really good. She understood their unsubs with a curious ease that was almost frightening. But it passed with the end of a case, and she did her part arresting them as good as anyone else. She wasn't socially awkward like Reid was, and he attributed her profiling ability to that. She could read people, that had to be it.

She could sure as hell read him. It was a little bit absurd, how much she knew about him, and so soon. And he knew comparatively little about her. Twenty-six, born in Argentina, raised in Italy, child of an Italian father and an American mother. Her father an art historian, her mother a psychologist in an inner-city high school. They lived in D.C. now, not far from Reid's apartment.

Thirty-six minutes, by car, in pre-dinner traffic to be exact. Reid drove carefully, anxiety pounding in his ears. Laura tapped out a melody on her leg, as if she were playing the piano.

"What are you playing?" asked Spencer, to say something.

Her sherry-colored eyes darted up. "Bach," she said, and did not elaborate.

"You…want the radio?" he asked.

"Sure," she said, then kicked herself mentally. Best to break herself of that particular speech habit before coming into her father's presence. "Um, Spencer?"

"Yeah?"

"When you meet my father…" she trailed off, unsure how to continue.

"What about meeting your father?"

"Uh, don't use slang."

Now Reid was the one to raise an eyebrow. Actually, both eyebrows—he couldn't raise just one, derisively, as she could. "I generally don't," he said.

"I know," she said. "Just—make sure."

"Okay," he said. "All right. I will."

"Good. I'm glad."

"Laura?"

"Yeah—yes?"

"Should I…be afraid of meeting your dad?"

Her sherry-colored eyes sought out her shoes on the car floor. "Uh, no."

Reid knew enough about human interaction to know that wasn't a good sign. "He, uh, he works at the museum, right? Downtown?"

"Yes," Laura said. "He's an expert in Florentine pre-Renaissance painting."

_And serial murder_, she thought, but she said instead, "And he loves to cook, so dinner will be fantastic. He loves wine, too." _Way to hand over your dad's profile on a silver platter_.

"Oh." Reid's eyes flicked away, too fast for Laura to pass of as the natural consequence of driving.

"Don't worry," Laura said, "he'll have it picked out already. You don't need to know anything about it—or drink it. Just hold the glass up to the light and swirl it under your nose and look like you're enjoying the scent."

Reid, unsure of what to say, clicked the radio on and paged through until he found a classical channel, to please Laura. She played out the Chopin prelude on her thigh and hummed contentedly until they turned onto her parents' street.

The Petrocchis' house was a Georgetown row house. Huge, red brick, absolutely gorgeous. Reid gawped a little.

"Drive," Laura said.

"I-I can't parallel park," Reid said. There was a car looming in the Petrocchis' driveway, something sleek and silvery in the twilight.

Laura made an irritated noise. "Chinese fire drill," she said, and hopped out of the car like a cat.

"Huh- what?" Reid sat, bewildered, for a moment until she tapped on his side of the window, motioning for him to get out, laughing. He scooted over clumsily and she took his seat and parallel parked like an FBI agent about to run into a building ahead of a SWAT team.

Oh, yeah.

"Come on," she said, oddly giddy, and hurried to the door, heels clacking on the asphalt.

Reid followed at a stilted run.

…

The Petrocchis' home was lovely inside as well, the original architecture refurbished, even improved upon. Wood glowed, jewel tones glimmered. Reid's eyes were overwhelmed with color. Laura embraced fervidly the man and the woman who opened the door. A hand came into Reid's line of sight; he shook it.

"Mr. Reid," said the man, Laura's father. He was shorter than Reid was. His voice was like copper, the sleek red grain of mahogany. He stood in a tuxedo, tailored. Reid felt underdressed and small, even though he stood half a foot taller than Laura's dad.

"Mr. Petrocchi," said Reid. Laura elbowed him subtly in the ribs. "Ow!"

She rolled her eyes.

"Doctor," she hissed.

"So am I," he said.

"As is Laura—but of course she, like me, has an M.D."

"God, you can be a snob sometimes," said Laura's mother. "I apologize for my husband and my daughter, Dr. Reid. Sometimes, for all their education, they quite forget their manners."

There was a tinge of a drawl lurking around the vowels in Mrs. Petrocchi's voice. She was a small woman, smaller than Laura—how had Laura attained even her unimpressive height?—with auburn hair, gleaming like wood in the low light. Longer than Laura's, loose about the shoulders, strands of silver in it. She had sharp blue eyes, and she wore a dark grey dress, something like Laura's. Reid thought her earrings were sapphire, but he wasn't good at telling things like that.

"Hello, Mrs. Petrocchi," said Reid. "Nice to meet you."

"Nice to meet you, too, Dr. Reid," she said, and smiled reassuringly.

"Uh, Spencer, please, Mrs. Petrocchi," said Reid.

"Claire," she said.

"Claire," Reid repeated. Her face slipped into his memory, beside Laura's and Dr. Petrocchi's, forever.

…

Of course their names weren't Claire and Vincenzo Petrocchi, and Laura had been born Beatrice. The identities were good, of course, very good- they'd stood up to an FBI background check, clearly—but they still weren't real. Laura had found out the names when she was six. Clarice Starling, Hannibal Lecter, which made her Laura-Beatrice Lecter. Oddly enough, she'd never minded her father being a serial murderer. She was young enough when she figured it out that it hadn't seemed terribly out of the ordinary, and now it simply seemed normal. She knew intellectually that what her father did was wrong, but she _felt _that he was her Papa and she loved him, and so that always took precedence. If the BAU were ever called in on a body that resembled the Chesapeake Ripper case, she wasn't sure what she'd do. If it were her father—but it wouldn't be, he _didn't _do that anymore—she knew, without question, that her loyalty lay with him before it did the BAU. But Spencer, that was something else. From him, she wasn't sure if she could turn and run.

…

Reid would tell himself later that he should have noticed something at that dinner. If it was anyone but Laura, he would have been warier, or his brain would have been more open to making connections, dragging the old Ten Most Wanted photo of Lecter out of its storage place in his brain, scanning the key words in the Lecter biographies he had read. This was, after all, the killer who most fascinated Reid—how could such intelligence, such refinement, coexist with the monster who had killed and eaten fourteen people?

If Reid had been paying attention to his surroundings instead of his manners, things might have begun to click in his clockwork brain:

Male, mid to late 60s, dark hair, small, Italian suit, metallic voice, art historian, Bach, Florence—

Female, mid-40s to early 50s, red hair, slim, runner, blue eyes, psychologist, kind of Southern accent—

Doctor at 17, FBI profiler, _family tradition_—

But this was Laura, strong, brilliant, soft, beautiful Laura; Laura's beloved Papa and her Maman. She called her mother mother or mom now, but when she talked about her childhood it was Mama or Maman. Reid thought her little Europeanisms were extensions of her beauty and sophistication. Another odd thing he should have noticed: Laura and her record said she'd been born in Argentina, and brought up in Italy, but she spoke Italian with an accent, and not the Anglo accent of a girl raised in a foreign country but speaking English at home; not an Anglo accent at all.

Reid knew because he'd listened to her speak Italian countless times: to friends, to her father on the phone—"Buongiorno, Papa, come sta? Io sono abbastianza bene, grazie…" But mostly her medieval Italian. Part of what they shared was memories of parents reading them medieval literature. Spencer had had Chaucer in his mother's bed, Laura had had Dante at her father's knee.

After Hankel, Laura took him to her place, drew him a bath, and put him to bed beside her. She read him Dante's _Inferno _in English, but when the mentions of sinners got to be too much for him she began reciting the original in Italian. Reid knew a little, but not so much that he couldn't ignore the meaning and let the words wash over his ears like music as he drifted away.

Before he did though, his ever-busy mind filed away a note about the sounds of her vowels: a little nasal, clipped. She spoke Italian like she was Swiss, hints of French and German in her speech, her _quellos _without quite the right Latinate push of a w behind them, as if she was saying "_Quelle?" _instead.

But her father's Italian accent, as he debated something rapid-fire with Laura and Claire, was different. Almost perfect, but with the slightest hint of Eastern Europe in it. Claire's of course, was American. He could almost place her vowels now. West Virginian. His brain whizzed a little, spinning its wheels, but found no traction.

"Well, then," said Dr. Petrocchi, the sudden switch into English jolting Spencer back into reality, "let's adjourn to the dining room, shall we?"

…

"This is fantastic, Mrs. Petrocchi," Reid said. Thankfully, a single elbow to the ribs from Laura had been sufficient to ensure that he spoke only after he had safely swallowed his food.

Clarice—Claire to Reid—laughed heartily. "As if I could ever cook like that," she said, and smiled. "My husband gets the credit."

"Well, thank you, Dr. Petrocchi," Reid said. "It's delicious."

"I'm glad you like it," Laura's father said.

There was a lull; Reid wasn't very good at small talk.

"Anything interesting at the museum, Papa?"

"There's the traveling Caravaggio exhibit. We just began putting it together today. You and Spencer might enjoy that, no?"

"Peut-etre," Laura said.

"Laura."

"Sorry."

Reid glanced between Laura and her father in mild bewilderment.

"I taught Laura that it is very rude to speak a language not understood by all present at the table," Dr. Petrocchi explained, " and courtesy is very important in this family."

"It's fine," Reid said. "I understood. My mother was a professor of fifteenth-century literature. England was under Norman control at the time, so even if my French is a bit rusty-"

Laura laughed.

"What?" asked Reid.

"Nothing's rusty to you, Spencer," she said. "He has an eidetic memory," she explained to her parents.

"Oh, that's amazing," said Claire.

"Fascinating," said Dr. Petrocchi.

"It's nothing I did," Reid said, blushing. "Your daughter's memory is far more impressive."

"I'm sure most of mine can be chalked up to genetics, too," she said, glancing at her father.

"I did teach you," he said, somewhat cryptically.

"Yeah—yes—but it's still not something everyone can manage."

"Having learned it at thirty-three, I can tell you it's difficult," Claire said.

Spencer felt himself completely lost. "What?"

"Memory palaces," Laura said. "I'm sure I've told you that's how I remember things. The method of loci?"

"Oh, yes," Spencer said. "Though I don't think you have told me."

"I'm sure-"

"We won't discuss it now," said Dr. Petrocchi authoritatively. "We'll have the next wine, I think. Claire?"

"I opened it earlier; it's breathed."

"Very good. Laura?"

"Of course," she said, and sprang from her chair, disappearing into the kitchen.

Spencer gulped.

**A/N: Soooo….sorry I've been neglecting my other fanfictions. To be fair, this has been lingering in my brain and then on my computer for a while, waiting for me to find a good stopping point for a first chapter, and here it is. I've been watching a lot of Criminal Minds lately, a side effect of taking a math class (math doesn't occupy enough of my brain for me to focus on just that), and Spencer Reid has joined the list of my favorite characters in all the world. So naturally, a show about catching serial killers led me to think about my favorite serial killer, who's been on that list for a year or so now, and how he might come into contact with this section of the BSU/BAU…I know there're a ton of "Hannibal's daughter" stories out there, but I think this one has enough of a twist that it's excusable. Plus, Laura may seem like a Mary Sue, but I assure you that she has her flaws—this chapter was mostly, indirectly, from Reid's perspective, and he's kind of in awe of his girlfriend, so they aren't as evident—and I certainly did not go to medical school at seventeen. I was also not raised by Hannibal Lecter, and that's **_**got **_**to have a significant impact on a person…the point is, Laura's no kind of manifestation of me, at least not any more than any character I create—or borrow—comes to be. And she's got a function. **

**Also, be forewarned—this crossover may double-crossover into the realm of Dexter, but I don't foresee anyone needing knowledge of that show if it does indeed happen. **

**Oh—and I don't know Spencer Reid, Hannibal Lecter, Clarice Starling, or any other Criminal Minds/SotL characters that find their way in here. Laura's the only one that's mine—and not even fully, since she's been influenced by these other characters created by other people. **


	2. In Which Certain Details Escape Reid

**A/N: Sorry for the long gap in updating. Summer is busier than it ought to be, and to think now they're talking about getting rid of summer vacation again. Clearly none of these politicians has experienced the joys of modern AP classes. Oh well, hopefully they won't get rid of it for college, anyway. They ought to know we need the time to make whatever minimum wages we can obtain. Besides, I do my best learning in summer. But I've rambled long enough. Also, as I forgot to ask last time, can any of you tell me the slip Dr. Lecter made last chapter? Not even he is perfect. You get full points if you do it before you read this chapter, on your word of honor. It still won't be fully revealed, but the diligent will be able to find it after reading. Anyone who gets it will still, however, beat Reid. **

**Disclaimer: Only Laura belongs to me. Unfortunately her apartment does not, and neither do her parents, or her boyfriend, or their colleagues, or, really, most things in the world, all considered. **

They went to Laura's apartment, where they mostly stayed. Hers was larger and better appointed, and after visiting her parents' house Spencer could see where she got her taste. It was only a modified sort of studio, but spacious, with the bed on a loft so high and large as to make it more aptly a bedroom on a second floor. Laura's bed was a queen-size four-poster with curtains of thin ivory linen draped to make an artful canopy. Her bedspread was sage, with a rich pattern of orange and burgundy roses that might have been either medieval or Victorian. She kept the bed done up with many pillows. She had a Tibetan prayer rug on the oak floor, though she didn't pray, and an Indian printed scarf draped over the chair at the foot of the bed. There was a large barrel window on the level of the bed, and before it was a small window-seat, also covered in pillows and scarves. On the closet, which was wide with little depth and had two sets of opaque French doors, she had hung Japanese brush paintings of roses and some other kind of leafy plant, all black on ivory. The first time he had been allowed access to this upper level, Spencer had inspected them. Her name was penciled in the corners, in a childish hand.

Up until he noted that detail, he had been wondering how old they were, and how expensive, and wishing he knew more about Japanese art.

She also kept a small escritoire on this level, with several hidden compartments, and three bookshelves, mahogany, with some kind of Asian carving on the sides, floral in nature. All of her shelves, and her desk, were stuffed with books, and that wasn't even counting her office nook on the main level. She'd put her desk before a small recessed window and made two extended walls of bookshelves. There were more books in the living space area, by the fireplace. Even Spencer hadn't got through everything here yet. She had, of course, many books familiar to him, both because of their parents' similar interest in medieval literature, and because of their shared occupation. There were the standard texts on justice and profiling. Neither one of them found any to be of much use. There were the unfortunately lurid paperbacks, most of which she kept upstairs. There were her medical books. She had a decent amount of philosophy. She preferred the French to the Germans he liked. She had all of John Fowles, which he found morbidly amusing. All of Shakespeare. Tolstoy, James, T.S. Eliot. Books he'd never be able to read—a few in some Cyrillic language that wasn't Russian, more in German, Spanish, Italian. Quite a few in French. Her higher education was American, though slightly understated: Smith, a master's from Brown in physical anthropology, and then of course Harvard Medical School. She did have some antique-looking medical books in other tongues, most of which he wasn't allowed to touch. She said they were gifts from her father. She also had half the awful history of physical anthropology in leather-bound French. Her kitchenette was small but lovely, granite countertops, state-of-the art fridge, small but very well-stocked wine selection. The walls were cream, the floor light, polished hardwood, with a large Persian rug before the fireplace. She had her piano and her beautiful violin. The furniture was carefully selected, the art impeccable. He always half-thought he had crossed a line in time and space and landed in a faded, romantic Victorian Paris afternoon when he awoke from a half-sleep entangled in her bedding and pale afternoon-sunlight from her high window.

It was all made of cream and mahogany, like her. He had enjoyed meeting her parents, who both exuded quiet mystery, like her. There was her father's arrogant intelligence, which he'd be lying if he didn't admit he and Laura didn't both share, to a degree. And something about her father's interrogation in the hallway nagged at him, but he couldn't—god, it was like his allergies, when his throat or the insides of his ears itched and it was impossible to scratch without killing himself, which at 3 am on the worst nights of allergy season seemed an idea not without its merits.

But her mother was nice. Claire and Vincenzo both seemed to have Laura's ability to sense the workings of others' minds, but Claire used it to calm and Vincenzo to annoy, like scraping a knife blade against skin just hard enough to let dead flakes fly and give the nerves an inkling of what might come.

And Laura used it to help him, to drive Morgan mad on occasion, to ease J.J.'s mind and Emily's fear of her own hardness, to pull smiles from Hotch and laughs from Rossi, to let Garcia feel needed and loved, and to smoke out serial murderers and at least 60% of the time get them to confess everything, often without even a plea bargain.

Claire couldn't do that. He had no doubt Vincenzo could, and probably more. He might be able to drive an innocent man to confess and to believe himself, with those eyes, which he wore with so much more ferocity than his daughter did. Although he'd never been on the receiving end of an interrogation glare from her, so he couldn't be sure.

God, what was it he'd said.

_Laura, an early date in a coffee shop. The deep sienna wall behind her, the mustard yellow of her chair. The sunlight coming through the window making her hair red. She had on a blouse, a deep blue. Looked like work clothes. Coffee mug, cream-colored, clutched in her hand, her lips stained just slightly more berryish than their natural shade, smudge of charcoal eyeliner bringing out the red of her odd eyes. Her lips were moving, eyes bright. _

He strove to turn on the audio in his memory; it was more difficult than it might seem. There had been music in the background, mushy forgettable jazz. He turned it off. _"Papa?" _she said, _"Papa's an art historian. He works at the Smithsonian, now. He's just come from the Uffizi, on loan with some paintings as it were, that's how attached to them he is_. _He loves the literature too, medieval Italian. Dante is his favorite. That'd still be medieval in England, it's almost up to Renaissance in Italy, but not quite. He's been studying Florence in one way or another for a long time." _

And then, in the warm glowing foyer a few hours before:

_The sharp sudden pain of Laura's elbow in his side._

"_Ow!" _

_The hiss of her voice in his ear: "Doctor." _

"_So am I." _

_Then the silky menace of Dr. Petrocchi—but what had he said, something strange, off…_

"Spencer?"

The rhythmic, fast, clicking of Laura's shoes on the stairs.

She kicked them off and hopped onto the bed beside him, letting it bounce.

"Did you like them?"

Of course she'd want to do a post-mortem.

"Yes, a lot. Your mother is really nice, and your father is—very intelligent."

"And intimidating, I'm sorry. He usually has better manners."

"Those were pretty much impeccable."

"The ones he taught me included neither terrifying the guests by one's bearing at table, nor denigrating their credentials out loud."

There was a small scratching as the wheels turned in Reid's brain, but nothing clicked quite yet. Still, he could feel it, like a mosquito bite on his hippocampus.

"What did your father say, in the hall?"

She groaned. "Papa said a _lot _in the hall. Better to forget."

"Yeah, I guess."

" It was auditory, so you _can_, right?"

"Yes."

"It's incredible how that works."

"It's incredible how you remember so much without an eidetic memory."

"I do have a heavily _eidetic _memory, just not a photographic one. I use visual cues to recall other things—it's a complex system."

"Like the method of loci."

"Very like." _Wouldn't do to let you know how much; I do believe some hack psychologist somewhere along the line did manage to deduce the general shape of Papa's mind, if nothing within it. And if I'm correct, it's in one of your beloved serial-killer biographies, love. Can't have you recalling that detail and associating it with me and mine. _

Laura, who was after all the daughter of Hannibal Lecter, master of not getting caught, and of Clarice Starling, who once offered Lecter her breast to save her life, decided a distraction was in order, and issued a preemptive strike against a quite familiar discourse on the memory palaces of the Greeks by covering her lover's mouth with her own.

Unfortunately, as Laura's father once told her mother, being smart spoils a lot of things, and in this case, it meant that even as the well-matched pair moved beneath the covers, Spencer's mind was not quiet, and the clicking of its gears continued even as both, some lovely time later, lapsed into a sleep less troubled than it might have been, and more troubled than Laura would have liked.


	3. And Are Pointed Out to Laura's Father

Laura and Spencer were jolted from sleep by the shrill ring of her phone, followed by the buzz of his.

_Ring_. A pause just long enough for sleep to claw one back into its grasp. _Buzz_. Repeat.

Laura pulled herself onto the shore of wakefulness first, grabbing her phone.

"Hotch? Yes. On my way. Reid? I'll stop by, pick him up on the way. Okay. Bye."

Spencer mumbled something about the growth rates of arthropods into his pillow. Laura kicked him, then clambered over him and went to her dresser.

"Ennh—whaa?"

"Answer your phone, Spencer Reid. I told Hotch I was coming to pick you up—what's wrong with your car?—but you're not supposed to know that yet."

"Okay…" Spencer groped for his phone, which was on the dresser. Laura threw it, aiming a few hairs shy of his head.

"Ow, hey!" He scrabbled for it under the covers. "Hi, Hotch. Yeah—Agent Petrocchi? Okay, I'll be ready."

Reid hung up and grinned. "Apparently you're going to be at my apartment in fifteen minutes."

"I may be late. Traffic's bad."

"It is? Because the traffic patterns at this time on your usual route from here to my apartment indicate that-"

"Spencer?"

"What?"

"I'm not going to your apartment. You're here. But Hotch thinks…"

"Oh," Reid said, the light slowly dawning. "_Traffic_. You know what, I did hear that there were going to be some unexpected detours…"

"Mmm, unexpected?"

"Yeah…"

….

Even with the terrible traffic, an hour later they were at Quantico and eminently presentable, pulling go-bags from beneath their desks.

"Did you two come in together?" Prentiss asked with a furrowed brow.

"Hotch asked me to pick Reid up."

"Oooh, Reid, did you have a date?" demanded Morgan.

Laura raised an eyebrow. "At six a.m.?"

"A _good _date."

"Actually, um, my car isn't working, and, uh, given the locations of all of our homes, commute times, and morning traffic, Laura is the logical choice for optimal efficiency and minimal disruption of routine-"

"Optimal, huh?" said Morgan.

"You are absurdly puerile and extremely disgusting to boot, Morgan," Laura said.

"Disgusting?" said Reid.

"It's disgusting that Morgan would be so juvenile as to imply that my giving you a ride connotes some kind of sexual encounter," Laura explained. "You're kind of cute."

"Thanks a bundle, Petrocchi," said Morgan.

"You're most welcome."

"Leave her alone, Morgan," said Reid.

"Awww," said Prentiss, "you two geniuses make such a cute couple."

Laura said, "Emily, if I didn't like you so much, I would kill you in your sleep."

"Please no one kill anyone," said Garcia, preceding Hotch, Rossi, and JJ into the bullpen.

"Not here at least," Rossi put in.

"Not anywhere, please," said Hotch.

"Conference room, while we're all still alive, guys," JJ said, and in they filed.

…

Settled in the conference room, the team listened intently (though Morgan was still a little preoccupied with smirking at Reid whenever the younger man glanced his way) as JJ ran down the case.

"Baltimore PD has been seeing these cases pop up, one every spring, for six years."

"Six _years_?" said Prentiss. "And they're just calling us now?"

"They've only just put it together," explained JJ. "The first three didn't even seem like murders, and no one connected the others."

"Six victims?" asked Reid.

"That we know of."

"If the police didn't even realize they were murders, what made them change their minds?" asked Morgan.

"The detective on the case two years ago had also been on one of the first ones, declared a suicide," JJ said. "He realized the similarities, went back through the old case files, and called us."

"Why at 5 am?" asked Morgan. "I mean, if he only kills once a year, what's the urgency?"

"There isn't a fresh case yet," said JJ.

"You mean-"

"He kills every March," said JJ. "It's March 25th. And he hasn't killed yet."

…

"I like him," Clarice Starling, alias Claire Petrocchi, said decisively to her husband over breakfast, as her daughter was poring over crime scene photos on the drive to Baltimore.

"Whom?" Hannibal Lecter, M.D. was reading his Italian paper contentedly in between sips of the orange juice he had squeezed not twenty minutes before.

"Dr. Reid, Laura's boyfriend?" Clarice said. "You know, the one who sat squirming in our house for three hours last night?"

"Hmm. He's a Ph.D?"

"He has three, and two bachelor's degrees," Clarice said. "Which you would know if you'd been paying attention to anything besides making him even more fidgety than the poor kid probably is normally. "

"I was paying attention, my dear," Hannibal said.

"Really?"

Hannibal looked up at the gleeful tone in his wife's voice. She had a grin on her face that made her look, as she'd have said, like the cat who ate the canary.

"_What_?" he asked suspiciously.

"You told him you were a medical doctor, Vicenzo Petrocchi, _Ph.D_, of the Smithsonian," Clarice said, smiling.

Hannibal closed his eyes tightly. "No…"

"Yes."

The memory of himself, standing in the hallway, returned. "Yes. Oh dear."

"He didn't notice," grinned Clarice. "Too nervous. But you, my dear medical doctor, are losing your touch."

"Is that so?"

"Mayyybee," Clarice responded, giggling like a West Virginia teenager stroking the dust on her porch with a bare foot as she twirled the phone cord around her wrist with one hand and played with her hair with the other.

"Why don't we just see about that…"

…

**A/N: So both Dr. Reid and the Good Doctor himself are temporarily distracted from the G.D.'s breach of protocol…but god only knows how long that can last, with an eidetic profiler and Hannibal Lecter involved…and we have a case, too, in the G.D.'s old stomping grounds no less…hmm…**


	4. Laure Petiot

Laura had seen quite a bit of horror in her life, and not just in her adult line of work. Hannibal Lecter had what might be (mildly) termed a 'dislike' for the sport of hunting, which some might call a bit hypocritical. Nonetheless, he understood perfectly the occasional _necessity_ of hunting and otherwise obtaining edible materials from one's surroundings. Now, he had absolutely no intention of ever returning to a state of starvation in a cold, abandoned forest, but the vagaries of an indifferent universe, he well knew, are nigh to uncontrollable, and Clarice and Laura ought to have the means of survival at their disposal should the need for them ever arise. Clarice needed little instruction, being a crack shot of the first order and a girl whose only privacy in childhood had come from wandering the woods, and she even taught him a few things about American plants and game. Laura's instruction began at the age of six. She could find her way through miles of forest in three countries, field-dress a deer, cook a dish of venison roasted in the juice of seasonal berries or spicy local leaves over a fire she'd built, and be home with enough time before bed to play a piece from Bach to her father's exacting standards.

Clarice taught her to shoot. Hannibal taught her to wield a knife. She was accustomed to the mess of a dead animal before she began grammar school.

At ten, she came home for lunch to a house in the 15ieme arrondissement to find that something was not right. The door was unlocked. Clarice did not emerge when she called, "Maman?", which was odd, because her mother, at the time a Ph.D candidate at the Sorbonne, taught two morning classes and was always there to greet Laura at lunchtime.

Laura, never a timid child, advanced into the house, quiet now. She found no one on the first floor, and there were no footfalls upstairs. She therefore descended into the basement. This was unusual for several reasons. First, most homes in the neighborhood were apartment buildings, and second, most Paris residences do not have basements. Both of these could be explained by the provenance of the house, which had been in Lecter hands until a decade after the second World War, and then, unbeknownst to the authorities, had returned to a new pair of them in 1966, when a mysterious accident befell the owners. It had been leased out since then, and according to city and financial records, the current tenants, the Petiot family of Dr. Robert, Madame Anne-Marie, and Laure paid their monthly rent promptly to the owner, one Dr. Charles DuVergne.

Laure Petiot, alias Laura Petrocchi, alias _ma chere petite Laurette_, walked quietly down the thirteen stairs and into the cool stone cellar of her home, where her father, as his ancestors for several generations had on their vacations or exiles, kept his wines.

And at that particular moment, an about-to-become-deceased body, temporarily in the possession of one Jean-Marc Boisonne, lay stretched and bound to a table. Laure would learn later that Jean-Marc, like his unfortunate predecessor Commandatore Pazzi, was an unscrupulous mercenary. Unlike the Commandatore, Mr. Boisonne was not a police officer, and had not been made aware, despite extensive news coverage, that Mason Verger was quite dead and his reward for Dr. Lecter quite defunct.

Dr. Lecter, alias Dr. Petiot, alias Papa, was, at the moment Laure descended the stairs, in the process of lecturing Mr. Boisonne about integrity, the ethics of running into another man's home wielding a gun like a fool when a woman and child might have been there, and, most importantly, fact-checking. Had Laure not been his child, with his way of creeping up in absolute silence, he would likely have noticed her presence as she hid behind a rack of particularly fine reds and peered out. As it happened, it was Boisonne, strapped to the table, who noticed the light reflecting off a pair of eerie garnet eyes set in the delicate child's face of Laure Petiot.

"Help me!" cried Boisonne, unwisely (unsurprising, for wise men do not poke at a sleeping tiger, particularly not in the presence of its cub).

"Laure?" Lecter asked, turning. There was the slightest disturbance in the timbre of his eyes. "What are you doing here?"

More accurately, Lecter said "Laura? Che fa tu da queste parti?", and Jean-Marc had said, "Aide-moi!", which, above all, proved his foolishness. Even if one's potential rescuer is a child, it would behoove one to address her politely, thus with "Aidez-moi, s'il vous plait," or at the least, "Aidez-moi!"

Laure looked at her father and said, in English, "Maman wasn't here, so I came downstairs." She turned her gaze on Jean-Marc. "Who is he?"

"A man who wished to send me, and likely your mother as well, to our deaths or at least to prison, because he mistakenly believed that this act would earn him a great deal of money."

Laure processed this. "Is Maman all right?"

"Yes, " replied Lecter. "She shot this fellow in the shoulder when he came in uninvited, waving his pistol like a fool, and then she went out to retrieve some of her effects from the university."

"Oh." Laure regarded Jean-Marc again. "Are you going to kill him?" she asked. Laure had a little of her father in her, so more accurately she said, "Est-ce que vous lui allez tuer?"

"Oui," said Hannibal Lecter. "Tu comprends pourquoi il faut que je le fasse?"

"Oui," said Laure. "I understand why."

"Do you want to go upstairs?" asked her father.

Laure considered it for a moment. "No," she replied, and perched herself on the counter.

She did not enjoy watching her father kill Jean-Marc, which he did, mindful of her presence, with a simple morphine overdose, which would also make passing the death off as a suicide or an accidental OD far simpler.

"There," he said when he had finished removing the evidentiary bullet and bandaging the wound to make it appear as though it was older and had been treated by a doctor—which it kind of had. "Have you eaten lunch?"

"No, Papa," Laure said as Hannibal offered her his hand to assist her in her nimble leap from the counter.

"Mmm. How does fresh tapenade on a baguette sound?"

"Delightful!"

Laure Petiot ate her lunch and returned to class at 1 in the afternoon. Half an hour later, Anne-Marie Petiot retrieved her daughter, announcing to the school that there had been a family emergency to do with her parents and that the Petiots would be moving to Belgium to help them.

Instead, the Petrocchi family arrived in the Tuscan countryside a week later and settled not too far from Florence.

That first murder reverberated in the halls of Laura's memory palace now, as she took in the Baltimore crime scene photos. She couldn't say what it was—the seeming lack of blood, reminding her of Boisonne's neatly bandaged shoulder? The comparative neatness of the crime scenes, or the way they seemed like suicides?

Something struck her eyes, and she opened her mouth to speak as Reid blurted, "All their dresses are white. Did the victims own them, or did the unsub bring them with him?"

"I-I don't know," said Charles Cooper, the Baltimore detective on the case. He was sandy-haired with sprinkles of grey, quiet and unassuming with an odd undercurrent of bitter sarcasm that Reid found disturbing, mostly because he didn't quite always grasp that it was sarcasm. Fortunately, Laura or Morgan was usually around to explain, with varying degrees of patience.

"Petrocchi, Reid, go talk to the ME who examined the bodies," said Hotch. "Detective Cooper, would you mind going with them?"

"Of course," said Cooper, following Spencer and Laura out the door.

In the car, Laura pored over the photos. Then, without warning and much to Reid and Cooper's surprise, she grabbed her phone and called Hotch.

"I've got something," she said.

"You're there already?" Hotch asked, sounding surprised.

"No, in the photos—look at the photos. Do you notice anything strange about their feet?"

**Dun dun dun. Reviews are nice…Reid is feeling neglected, and we wouldn't want that ! **


End file.
